VICE correspondent Isobel Yeung traveled to a concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO, in Goias, Brazil to see firsthand how cattle are raised for slaughter. Photo credit: HBO

In Vice's fifth episode of season 4, Isobel Yeung traveled to feedlots, farms and slaughterhouses to learn where our meat comes from and to uncover its true costs, and Vikram Gandhi traveled to the Central Valley in California and São Paulo, Brazil to find out just how severe the global water crisis has become.

In California's Central Valley, farmers are quickly depleting the state's groundwater as the state remains mired in a drought, despite El Niño rains. São Paulo's drought has become so bad that water in at least one of the area's reservoirs is below what engineers consider zero, meaning that they have to pipe the remaining water uphill just to get it to the intake pipes.

Tulare County farmer Mark Watte shows VICE correspondent Vikram Gandhi the effects the California drought has had on his crops. Photo credit: HBO

"Meat production, globally, is an environmental disaster now," Ken Cook, president of Environmental Working Group, said. "If we try and expand production to reach 9 billion people by 2050, it will be a complete and unthinkable disaster."

"Let's assume the population will reach 9 billion by 2050," Cook said. "There isn't enough land, there isn't enough water, there isn't the capacity for the Earth's atmosphere to absorb all of the CO2 and the methane that would come out of animal agriculture. The problem is that our focus is on making the meat as cheap as possible, and as they cut those corners, that's where we often have environmental catastrophes."

But there are agricultural innovators hoping to change the way we raise animals for food. Yeung met with Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms in Virginia. Salatin uses a sustainable system of raising animals called "rotational grazing."

Young also met with Dr. Mark Post, professor of physiology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, to discuss his work on creating the first synthetic burger. He has grown meat in a lab from stem cells in just seven weeks—"much, much faster" than raising a cow for slaughter, he noted. The first trial cost $325,000, but he hopes to grow it cheaper and faster soon.

The world's unregarded forests are at risk. Intact forest is now being destroyed at an annual rate that threatens to cancel out any attempts to contain global warming by controlling greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new study.

As the world's population grows and the planet warms, demand for water will rise but the quality and reliability of the supply is expected to deteriorate, the United Nations said Monday in this year's World Water Development Report.

"We need new solutions in managing water resources so as to meet emerging challenges to water security caused by population growth and climate change," said Audrey Azoulay, director-general of the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), in a statement. "If we do nothing, some five billion people will be living in areas with poor access to water by 2050."

Despite a court-ordered injunction barring anyone from coming within 5 meters (approximately 16.4 feet) of two of its BC construction sites, opponents of the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline expansion sent a clear message Saturday that they would not back down.

Twenty-eight demonstrators were arrested March 17 after blocking the front gate to Kinder Morgan's tank farm in Burnaby, BC for four hours, according to a press release put out by Protect the Inlet, the group leading the protest.

Climate change is a big, ugly, unwieldy problem, and it's getting worse by the day. Emissions are rising. Ice is melting, and virtually no one is taking the carbon crisis as seriously as the issue demands. Countries need to radically overhaul their energy systems in just a few short decades, replacing coal, oil and gas with clean energy. Even if countries overcome the political obstacles necessary to meet that aim, they can expect heat waves, drought and storms unseen in the history of human civilization and enough flooding to submerge Miami Beach.

Trump has loudly declared his intention to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris agreement, but, behind the tweets and the headlines, U.S. officials and scientists have carried on working with international partners to fight climate change, Reuters reported Wednesday.

A Hollywood scriptwriter couldn't make this up. One day after new data revealed widespread toxic water contamination near coal ash disposal sites, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) head Scott Pruitt announced a proposal to repeal the very 2015 EPA safeguards that had required this data to be tracked and released in the first place. Clean water is a basic human right that should never be treated as collateral damage on a corporate balance sheet, but that is exactly what is happening.